LETTER FROM JERUSALEM NO MAN'S LAND The idea of a city disappears. BY ARI SHAVIT F or more than ten years, I have been takingwalks along the Gabriel Sher- over Promenade, an elegant stone path planted with rosemary and lavender, which was built in 1989 by the philan- thropist Gita Sherover in memory of her son. The promenade follows the bound- ary that divided Jerusalem's Jewish and Arab populations until the Six-Day War, Then, in the early afternoon of Janu- ary 11th, three teen-aged gang mem- bers from Abu Tor emerged from the southern end of the promenade and stabbed a sixty-four-year-old man from North Talpiot named Henry Weil, who was walking by the gardens. Weil was lucky-the knife missed his heart by an inch, and he survived. About On a brisk afternoon in early April, SWomo Aronson, who is Israel's leading landscape architect and who designed the promenade, walked with me. We passed through an olive grove, stopping to look at an ancient aqueduct below and at the charred remains of the gazebo. Aronson, a pensive, soft-spoken man in his mid-sixties, was distressed about what had happened to the promenade. "For more than a decade, the con- cept of a cosmopolitan, worldly Jerusa- lem promenade did work," he said. Until two years ago, one could see black- hatted ultra-Orthodox Jews flying kites with their children, while Palestinian women strolled by in their colorful sum- mer best. "What really gets me is that the attackers came from Abu Tor," Aron- .... r:- .., Lt. . I... ., 'irli"..... -', I t.. ."'" Friends in Tel Aviv ask me why I stay on in the midst offanaticism and coriflict. It's loyalty, I suppose. Loyalty to lost causes. in 1967, and it overlooks the arid white hills of the Judean desert, the Old City, the Temple Mount, the golden Dome of the Rock, and the black dome of Al Aqsa. Bakaa, a middle-class Israeli neighborhood, is half a mile to the west; T alpiot, another middle-class Israeli neighborhood, is half a mile to the south; and Abu Tor, a Muslim commu- nity, is a few hundred yards east. Even after the second intifada broke out, in September of 2000, Jerusalem- ite Jews and Jerusalemite Arabs shared the publIc spaces of the promenade-a playground, a kiosk, a gazebo-although they did not often interact. The prome- nade remained quiet until last autumn, when the kiosk and the gazebo were burned down by Palestinian teen-agers. 56 THE NEW YOR.KER., DECEMBER. 9, 2002 a month later, on February 8th, the gang attacked Moran Amit, a twenty-five- year-old Hebrew University student who was walking with her boyfriend by the promenade, in a wooded area called the Peace Forest. Armed with knives and tear gas, the boys stabbed her numerous times, and she died within hours. (Her boyfriend escaped unharmed.) Eight Abu Tor teen-agers, arrested in connec- tion with the arson and the stabbings, are in j ail, awaiting trial. Almost no one comes here anymore. When I say I am going for a walk, my family and friends are apprehensive. There is always the question of how far I should go. When does it become irra- tional? And who is that leather-jacketed guy approaching from the other end? son said. "Had they come from one of the refugee camps, I would understand. But they are from here. They grew up here-they are only a bit older than the promenade itsel[ And they prob- ably used to play here, on the slides and swings. I wonder whether this concept we had of a cosmopolitan, non- religious Jerusalem was plausible at all. Perhaps it was not. Perhaps it was self-deception. Look at the promenade now-so empty and foreboding. It's a , 1 d " no mans an . A fter a few months of relative calm, in Jerusalem if not in the rest of the country, early on the morning of Thursday, November 21st, there was another pigu'a-the Hebrew word for a 0